Oracle RAC Virtualization

Oracle RAC DBA tips from Expert Remote DBA Team

Oracle 11g RAC- Virtual Oracle RAC Clustering

Virtualization means one physical server to be distributed between multiple operating systems. One or more independent operating systems can be deployed on single physical server environment. These independent operating systems are locating in single physical server due to this reason called as guest operating systems. Most excellent Oracle 11g RAC new feature for remote database services.

Enabling more than one guest operating system in one physical server is becoming easy because you should need to copy one guest operating system's configuration file to another location and need change some contents only. Means you don't need to install same guest operating system again and again. In virtualization you can save time to install operating systems, configuration of operating systems. You can also able to reduce the time it takes to create new database or Oracle software installations.

When we are discussing virtualization then we can also take advantage of advance virtualization which can provide live migration to transfer of live operating system snap to another server across the network. Means we can take advantage of this live migration feature in Oracle RAC to shift to another higher end or higher configuration server to increase demand of resources.

What is Virtual RAC Cluster concept in Oracle 11g?

Oracle 11g RAC supports virtualization. We can install Oracle 11g RAC on single physical server and install one or more guest operating systems on same server to take advantage of virtual RAC Cluster features. Indeed single virtual Oracle 11g RAC node cluster doesn't advisable to gain good performance benefits. We can configure single node virtual Oracle RAC cluster to shared workload and resources. However, we can add node on same configuration and able keep another nodes for future upgrade, applying patches or failover configuration of Oracle RAC. Means we can use one node Oracle RAC for managing resources and sharing resources across to applications using virtualization feature and manage another node for high availability, failover or applying required patches.

Advantages of Virtual Oracle 11g RAC Cluster Concept:

Some useful and excellent advantages of Virtualization Oracle 11g RAC features are following.

It saves cost of hardware & software requirement.

It reduces time of installation, configuration of new guest operating systems.

It enables flexibility to move operating system & software images to another server.

Disadvantage of Virtual Oracle RAC Cluster:

There are following major disadvantages of virtual Oracle RAC cluster.

Virtualization software and guest operating system is snatching system resources from principal operating system and main physical server. Hence, performance of physical server will be degraded compare to single node Oracle RAC instance concept. High expertise is needed to manage in remote dba services.